Email beats snail mail for residential use

Email has outpaced the traditional letter for residential use, perhaps a timely development as mail carrier Consignia considers dropping the second post.

Internet measurement company NetValue found that 550 million emails were sent and received in British homes over the month of January, compared to 258 million letters handled by the Royal Mail in the same period.

"This is a real milestone for email," said NetValue's managing director, Alki Manias, noting that email had surpassed centuries of Royal Mail service in just seven years.

NetValue found that nearly 13 million people regularly used email in their homes, sending about 12.3 emails and receiving 39.1 during the month. The discrepancy between the number received and those sent suggested that people were being spammed by advertisers in much the same way as leaflets are pushed through the letterbox, Mr Manias said. The study focused only on home usage, but Mr Manias postulated that the ratio of email versus post at work would be much greater. However he did not think this made traditional post obsolete.

"It's just like theatre or cinema when television took off. We didn't lose cinema, it just became a special occasion," Mr Manias said.

He pointed to rocketing sales of digital cameras, which allowed people to share photos of friends, family and holidays instantly across large distances. Emailed greeting cards and digital photos may be more acceptable now, but are not a substitute for the post on every occasion.

"People will still want to pour their heart out in letter or want that special photo of a grandchild. It's horses for courses," he said.

A spokeswoman for the Royal Mail said email and the traditional post were used for different reasons, and pointed out that the letters market was still growing by up to 3% a year.

"We fully recognise that email is used extensively but used for very different things than the post. Emails are often used for things like sending messages or jokes round the offices - things that the post would never be used for, so to compare raw figures is not comparing like with like," she said.

Consignia, which is losing £1.5m a day and may lay off up to 35,000 workers, said last month it would trial a single post delivery for residential customers as a cost saving measure.